FSFE Newsletter - April 2015

Jonas Öberg visiting Boston without a pink backpack

Our new Executive
Director Jonas Öberg gave a talk at Libreplanet, and visited Boston to meet
FSF board members and staff. In his
blog posts he wrote about his meetings with Matthew Garret, Benjamin Mako
Hill, Bradley Kuhn, Henry Poole from FSF's board, FSF's staff as well as FSF's
Executive Director John Sullivan discussing how to improve cooperation and the
two main challenges he sees for FSFE:

analysing Free Software from legal, technical, and social dimensions
and ensuring that any challenges to Free Software within those areas are
met,

assuring that in a world of free and open everything, Free
Software is what ties everything together: you can not have open data, open
ecology, open government or open educational resources without Free
Software.

Furthermore he looks back to his first visit, at that time in his capacity
as GNU webmaster, in December 1999 with a pink backpack.

FSFE supporting the Christoph Hellwig GNU GPL enforcement lawsuit

Free Software is a public resource, and it is governed by legal rules and
social norms. Anyone who draws on this resource without respecting those rules
and norms damages the community at large. The great majority of such problems
are successfully resolved through dialogue and goodwill. It is only when
dialogue fails that legal steps become necessary in order to protect this
resource which we all share.

While FSFE regrets that this lawsuit has arisen, we believe that
safeguarding Free Software against those who try to appropriate for themselves
what belongs to us all is of the utmost importance.

Joint statement on the use of Open Standards in the European Commission

Open Standards are formats and protocols which everybody can use free of
charge and restriction and for which no specific software from a particular
vendor is required. It is important that every EU citizen and company should
have the right to communicate and interact with its administration using Open
Standards exclusively, and not be forced to install and use software from any
specific vendor.

At Document Freedom Day (DFD), the international day to celebrate and raise
awareness of Open Standards, April (the French Free Software organisation),
European Digital Rights (EDRi), Open Forum Europe (OFE), the Open Source
Business Alliance (OSBA), and FSFE published a joint statement. Besides
generally highlighting the topic, the statement focuses on the improper use of
standards in the context of applying for EU programmes. (A full report
about the 60 DFD events in 31 countries will be published at the beginning of
April.)

Something completely different

Just how transparent does the European Parliament have to be? In its own
rules of procedure, the Parliament has set itself the high standard of
conducting its affairs in “utmost transparency”. Our president Karsten Gerloff
reports from an interesting discussion “Ensuring utmost transparency – Free
Software and Open Standards under the Rules of Procedure of the European
Parliament”, and what that means in practice.

This year the Free Software
Award went to Sébastien Jodogne for his work on Free software Medical
imaging with his project Orthanc and to Reglue, which gives GNU/Linux computers
to underprivileged children and their families in Austin, Texas.

FSFE welcomes Nicolas Dietrich in its General Assembly. He was elected by
our sustaining members, and thereby holds one of the two Fellowship GA
seats.

Franz Gratzer highlighted some English interviews
held during FOSDEM, and wrote about the booth presence of freie.it, which
was founded by some members of FSFE’s Viennese Fellowship group, as a web
platform to help people who are interested in using Free Software but who do
not want to administrate their own computers.

Since so many people like the slogan, we now also have the corresponding “There is no cloud, just other
people's computers” bags in our webshop. Furthermore we
have a new Open Standard t-shirt with robots in fitted light blue or a
non-fitted khaki, the “I love Free Software” t-shirt in light blue, or a fitted
“Hacking for Freedom” t-shirt in grey, as well as the metallic “GNU/Linux
inside” stickers and a golden GNU pin.

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About FSFE

Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to
control technology.

Software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. It is important
that this technology empowers rather than restricts us. Free Software
gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt and share software.
These rights help support other fundamental rights like freedom of
speech, freedom of press and privacy.

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